Drawings of Scientists by kids | Hacker News Reader

Drawings of Scientists by kids

ed.fnal.gov

82 pointsapu47 comments

I like how for some of them the "before" was a male and "after" was a female--especially with the girls. There's always an uproar about how there's a distinct lack of women in science and tech, so it's good that this trip helped them alter their ideas about what and who a scientist could be.

We still live in an age, though, where kids can go for a while through school with only hearing about Madame Curie and a few others (Magaret Meade, Jane Goodall, Sally Ride, Mae Jemison, etc.) as women scientists. Not taking anything away from them, but efforts to change that are always nice (both for boys and girls). I can remember being in quiz bowl at that age and knowing that anytime the moderator asked a question mentioning a female scientist, the ladies above were the likely answers.

Regarding there only being a few famous female scientists: the currently-accepted ev-psych. explanation is that men have a greater standard deviation in levels of achievement-seeking behavior. In any (objectively quantifiable) meritocratic field, you'll see women mostly in the middle, with men at the top and at the bottom. This means that the "stand-outs" will always be male-dominated (as will the "drop-outs", mind), unless the field has some sort of selection effect favoring women.

In a similar sense, I look forward to the day Neil deGrasse Tyson replaces George Washington Carver in grade school.

An interesting observation I read about a week or two ago when this first popped up was that not a single boy changed the sex of their prototypical scientist - every one was male - but some of the girls who drew males first did.

Of course not. Boys envision themselves as scientists in the future (at least I did), and so they project some of their traits onto the prototype. It wouldn't make sense if I, at 12, said 'I want to be a scientist.' and then all the scientists I drew were women.

In general what happened was that after the visit the kids start identifying scientists as actual people rather than an archetype, and thus, closer to themselves.

Some of the drawings make me wonder if the kids were coached towards a specific message...

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/david.html

Feels like they had a class discussion before each drawing. Its basically the same before and after theme. Before: white lab coat, glasses. After: 'normal' people. Not very scientific, excuse the pun.

I completely agree - I see these kids walking through the halls with employees who were told specifically "OK, emphasize normalcy."

Wouldn't it be ironic if this whole this was a setup experiment (well, it sorta was).

yeah probably all scientists were instructed to come in "blue" jeans only.

Because usually they only wear white overalls, as is common knowledge.

have you seen large groups of scientists at work? if not, maybe you're falling for the same stereotypes as those kids.

It's kind of ironic because what kids are taught is that science is objective. Instead of learning that about science, these kids were fed dogma - which is way to common in 'science' these days.

I liked the before drawings better, it appears that the kids image of a scientist was replaced by an image if a regular person, that somehow made the drawings more boring. Just check the contrast(this is the best artwork IMO):

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/nick.html

It appears to me that the second one was done with a lot less enthusiasm.

edit: The feet are drawn sloppier in the second one, also theres less detail in the face, no background, i think the kid just didn't know how to portrait a scientist anymore, so he did a generic person drawing, and since these are boring, he did a sloppy job at it. My 2c.

This isn't about liking the drawings - this makes the important distinction to kids that being a scientist doesn't mean complete exclusion from society. If you read the "pre" pictures from a lot of the kids, their perception of scientists was that of the aloof, disconnected, and obsessive. A visit to the lab changed that - and that can only be a good thing.

No matter what, kids (nay, all humans) desire to fit in. You cannot successfully ask them to go down a career path if you're going to be a surefire misfit/loser the entire way.

The fact that they now perceive scientists as normal people with no-so-normal jobs (to quote from one of the kids) is great, and perceptions like this will serve the scientific community a lot better than that of the obsessive maniac.

Jesse is a counter-example to this statement (but also, notably, apparently an anomaly.)

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/jesse.html

The second picture definitely has a higher awesome-factor than the first.

Interesting that the "before" virtually always are chemists in the lab, wearing a white lab coat and playing with some liquid, usually in a conic beaker. Aside from the "normal person" angle, it's interesting that the prototypical scientist is never a physicist or a field biologist, much less something as exotic as a computer scientist.

Computer science largely falls under the old dictum, "if it has the word 'science' in the name it isn't one".

Yes and no. While computer science research tend to overlap with other domains of study, there are many avenues of study that fall souly within it, Encryption, algorithms, discovery and application of probabilistic and logical laws. Just because you mostly hear about computer scientists running off and being programmers, dose not mean there is not serious research going on.

Be careful not to confuse science with pure mathematics.

The math in computer science may not be much like the usual idea of science, but neither is it what people ordinarily mean when they say "pure mathematics." It's much more nearly "applied mathematics," like statistics or signal processing or control theory: more likely to be interested in, e.g., the development of wavelets than in a proof of the Poincare conjecture.

Maybe it would've been more logical if the applied math end of the CS field had ended up with an applied-math-y name comparable to "statistics", e.g. "algorithmics" or "algorithmic analysis," and much of the rest of the CS field had ended up "software engineering" or "computer engineering" or "computational engineering" or "information system engineering" by analogy with "electrical engineering." But naming of technical fields is not necessarily systematically logical, sometimes because of old idiosyncratic reasons to avoid ambiguity with other pursuits: "astronomy" vs. "astrology," anyone?

Software engineering may be (currently) part of CS, but theoretical CS is more than just applied statistics. The halting problem, one of the most famous undecidable problems, is pure math and is CS. Lambda calculus is CS and is pure math.

Nick and Pat were sitting next to ea. other during the "after" session and collaborating :)

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/pat.html

http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/nick.html

I have a feeling that's a guy they met. Maybe a guide or speaker. Other common features were a man with a striped shirt, and possibly a woman who talked about her extramuros life.

All of these have the same beard: http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/pat.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/nick.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/jesse.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/michael.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/david.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/kevin.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/matt.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/amanda.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/betsy.html

And these the shirt: http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/amanda.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/betsy.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/jeffrey.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/kyle.html http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/james.html

Wait, so now I can't wear functional coats and glasses anymore while making discoveries? I have to care about fashion now? Well damn it.

I'd defintely be more motivated to do science as a kid imagining that it was all about blowing things up.

Also, this misses the fact that society just doesn't give too much funding for people doing the type of science that goes on at fermilab. The people that those kids saw were generally those that made it.

There are tons of people that study to be scientists and then end up not making the cut and having to spend the time afterwards working a science job like any other, often without much of the initial passion and curiosity.

Thats not to say that it might be better to (as a society) push people to learn about how the world works, than about something like buisness. At least science gives you some training in thinking.

Wow, this is great. I love the quote "Scientists live in their own world and the rest of society puts them there."

I call hoax on these drawings.

Look at them and notice how every drawing focuses heavily on the buttons on the shirts and coats. Plus the body sizes are very similar from drawing to drawing. This seems outside the level of probability for a sample of drawings this small. I highly suspect that all of the drawings were drawn by one adult trying to make it look like students drew them.

People who haven't learnt to draw (and I'd include all the children in this except possibly Nick and Matt) tend to draw symbols instead of accurate representations. So, what's the symbol for a scientist? A lab coat. What's the symbol for a lab coat? A white coat shape, with buttons down the front.

The children are about ten years old, right? So, despite their lack of skill in seeing, they have the dexterity to draw what they want to draw, and so you'd expect them to draw similar body sizes, in approximately the right proportion (except for the eyes which we tend to perceive as 1/3 of the way from the top, when in fact they are the midpoint.)

That's pretty ridiculous. The body sizes and visual similarities between students are not as close as you make it sound, I could easily see this set of drawings coming from one of my classes in seventh grade.

Why not go with the much simpler and much more likely explanation that the before and after pictures and descriptions all have similar content because the teacher held discussions before the students drew the pictures, and these discussions were lead in a certain direction.

"The stereotype gives the impression of a geek with glasses or someone who is bald. Actually, they are just people who ask and answer questions."

Nice!

This looks very staged. I can't help feeling the children we're given strong guidance in what to write/say in their after pictures.

Fantastic to see some of the mystic being taken out.

Next up: engineers! (No, we don't all fix cars or build bridges… ;))

stereotypically, engineers design cars- they don't fix them. Someone who fixes cars is called a mechanic.

Of course, modern bouts of sprucing up job title names (my favorite is 'sanitation engineer') means that mechanics can throw stones at me and demand I take that back. I liked the real names better. It's easier to tell people I worked as a bag boy than a 'courtesy clerk'.

Unfortunately it depends where you live. In Australia they're the ones who fix cars.

Does the US have a requirement that engineers are engineers (qualified engineers that is) ala claiming one is an attorney?

These kids are pretty terrible artists. Seventh grade is old too, these kids are like 12-13?

Gee, thanks, Maddox[1]. ;-)

[1] - (WARNING: Not safe for work.) http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=irule

uh i'm sure these kids weren't being specifically trained in fine art ... and also they might not have had a ton of time to make their drawings

"... Things that may change the world someday. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow."

Well said.

I love how the after is regularly "normal people with exciting jobs". I hope these kids become scientists :D

That actually disappoint me - that the quest for scientific understanding is being demoted to being just a job and not a vocation. To me a scientist will never really be someone who just does science for their job (no true [scottish] scientist would do that!!) - indeed a scientist needn't work as a scientist IMO.

I wanted to be a scientist. :-(

What's stopping you?

I couldn't get a degree.

This REALLY makes me wonder which I'd want to be: http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/dans.html

I love the effort, mystery and imagination that went into the first one. Would I want to be a guy that inspires that, or would I want to be the guy that inspires the normal "scientist" in the next drawing?

The first one brings about a sense of awe for these brilliant people that come up with fantastic answers to really difficult questions, while the second one reminds us that even the scientists are humans, and have a social life and enjoy themselves.

Both have their pros and cons.

Andy depicts some pretty badass scientists.

Link: http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/andy.html

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